A Whorfian Summary

31 August 2010

It is a few days old, but I just came across this New York Times article by Guy Deutscher. It is an excellent summation of how linguistic relativity (the Sapir-Whorf theory, which should really be called just the Whorf theory as Sapir really had nothing to do with it) is and is not valid.

I particularly like the quote from Roman Jakobson that, “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.”

(Hat tip to Arts and Letters Daily)

Video Friday: Stephen Fry on Swearing

27 August 2010

Not much to say, other than seeing a young Hugh Laurie doing comedy is also fun. (Why is it that comedians so often turn out to be fine dramatic actors, but the reverse is usually not the case.) Enjoy.

(Hat tip to Pharyngula)

More on Google Books

24 August 2010

[Actually, this is a year-old article—which explains why “there is little new” in it. I mentioned it a year ago. --DW, 8/27]

It’s been a while since I’ve posted or linked to a post about the problems with Google Books. But here’s an article on the topic by Geoffrey Nunberg. For those that are familiar with the topic, there is little new in this article, but the parade of errors in the metadata is humorous, if nothing else. And this conclusion of Nunberg’s is spot on:

In short, Google has taken a group of the world’s great research collections and returned them in the form of a suburban-mall bookstore.

While I share many of Nunberg’s complaints, I don’t share the sentiment in the title that Google Books is a “disaster.” On balance, Google Books is an invaluable resource. Yes, Google has gotten a lot of things wrong, and those errors severely limit the utility of the digital library, but the benefits of ready access to the truly vast number of books outweighs the problems with the system.

(Hat tip: Arts & Letters Daily)

A Couple of Links About Copyright

21 August 2010

The Arts and Letters Daily blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education is really a must-have for your RSS feed. Today, it features two articles of note about copyright.

The first is an article in Der Spiegel Online about a hypothesis by historian Eckhard Höffner that contends Germany’s economic and industrial expansion in the nineteenth century was largely the result of the country not having a copyright law. While I’m skeptical of this rather strong contention, I have no doubt that the free exchange of ideas does lead to economic and technological progress and that can be strangled when ideas are given too limited a circulation. In this case I think the problem in England, to which Höffner compares Germany, was not so much the copyright law, but the business models of the publishers that limited the free flow of ideas.

The second is a very creative, graphical review by cartoonist Ward Sutton of Lewis Hyde’s new book, Common as Air. Hyde’s book takes on what is perceived by many to be abuses of copyright law in contemporary American society. Evidently, Sutton regularly produces graphical reviews for Barnesandnoble.com.